Nothing but music
Nothing but music is a musical by the German director Stephan Barbarino , the author Jan Linders and the Israeli musician Ora Bat Chaim . At the center of the musical is the klezmer clarinetist Giora Feidman . Nothing but music premiered in May 2005 at the Grand théâtre de la ville de Luxembourg and then completed a European tour.
In addition to Feidman, the premiere cast included percussionist Murat Coşkun , mandolinist Avi Avital , accordionist Enrique Ugarte , flautist Raoul Avarellos, double bassist Guido Jäger, guitarist Jens-Uwe Popp and the singers and actors Marta Binetti, Meike Kircher, Anas Ouriaghli, Jenny Reuter, Kati Schröder, Leonid Semenov, Wilhelm Beck and Konrad Wipp.
In 2008, Barbarino staged the musical again with the original musicians and Italian actors at the Teatro Franco Parenti in Milan . An invitation to the Festival dei due Mondi Spoleto followed .
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The piece consists of ten pictures in which a journey is shown, both spatially around the world and temporally through the entire 20th century. The focus is on Klezmorim , Eastern European traveling musicians who, distributed all over the world, carry their attitude towards life with them. The first picture shows Chișinău in 1903, where the joie de vivre of a traditional wedding is depicted until a pogrom finally expels the Jews from their homeland. The next stop is Southampton 1912, where the waiting and dreaming of emigrants who are drawn to the New World is shown. In the third picture, the actors are in a brothel in Buenos Aires in 1923 , where klezmer music turns into tango sounds. New York City in 1932 is the location of the fourth picture, here scenes take place in a jazz club in which music is presented as the last, unassailable good of the poor and destitute. 1939, the year in which the Second World War broke out, is the subject of the fifth picture. The Bürgerbräukeller , referred to in the musical program as “Cave of the Lion”, shows the songs of the “bad people” shortly before the failed assassination attempt on Hitler. Nine years later, the actors are in the sixth picture: Shanghai as the “only city open to emigrants without a visa” is the setting for the philosophizing of a homeless person. A strong jump in time follows to the seventh picture, which shows young singing recruits in Tel Aviv shortly before the outbreak of the Six Day War . Music as a means of overcoming borders is at the center of the eighth picture, located in Berlin 1989, represented, among other things, by a musical connection between klezmer music and the German national anthem. The penultimate picture is set in a recording studio in Luxembourg and shows the musical transfiguration of a shtetl . This picture is described in the program booklet with “History becomes a business”. The musical ends with the tenth picture, which is set in the future, in Baghdad 2035. The journey ends in a looted museum with a melody that is supposed to represent nothing but music.
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- Jan Linders: Giora Feidman in: Nothing but music . Program for the musical Nothing but music .
- Miryam Gümbel: The victory of music . In: Jüdisches Europa , issue 2/2005; P. 5/6. Premiere review of Nothing but music , here online , accessed on August 3, 2013.